


once we were giants

by apiphile



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: 'I made a decision by myself' hrm canon will punish you for this, Also I blame Cracked.com for forcing me to write this, Bad Coping Skills, Drinking Your Feelings, F/M, Gen, James Rhodes is the only responsible adult in the Avengers my god, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Not coping, abusing the tag field for fun and no profit, and there's no incest, and to flirt with ao3tagoftheday, angry rebuttal fic, bad communication skills, being a superhero doesn't prevent you from being a super fuckup, but he definitely has ptsd, cats as coping mechanisms, complicated adult relationships, got drunk: woke up with a fanfic instead of a hangover, hiding from your feelings, honestly i just want ten million fics about wakanda but i'm just going to get jossed, how do friendship, i just didn't want to tag it that way, i seeeeeee you, i wrote this entire thing in one long sitting, if you read t'challa/tony into this you'd be right too, knitting instead of feelings, oh boy it's time for more tag terrorism, somnophobia, tony stark's like probably borderline, what's amazing about this is no one gets physically tortured, working instead of dealing with your feelings, yeah i see you posting literally every single one of my fics bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-08 23:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6879838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark and dealing do not go hand in hand. Tony Stark and listening to other people's advice do not go hand in hand. At least he's in good company.</p><p>POST-CIVIL WAR, CONTAINS SPOILERS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	once we were giants

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cribbins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cribbins/gifts), [george](https://archiveofourown.org/users/george/gifts), [fluorineandsilver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorineandsilver/gifts), [macabrekawaii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabrekawaii/gifts).



Day forty of Rhodey’s recovery. After filing a salutary letter from Steve on the pile of correspondence addressed to Miss Pepper Potts, and mentally unlabelled, Tony start began working his way through the internal mechanics of an unnecessarily complicated coffee-maker. It was supposed to interface with the fridge, and provide hot coffee only when there was definitely fresh milk, which it did often enough that it could theoretically be said to ‘work’.

Since Rhodey had been banned from caffeine on doctor’s orders, and in place of real optimism, Tony was in the process of trying to reconfigure the machine to only dispense hot coffee when it read a fingerprint ID it had on the whitelist. But _without_ alerting his friend to the fact that it was doing it. 

This, Tony acknowledged, was getting ahead of himself considering Rhodey had yet to get out of bed unaided.

“May I make an observation?” asked the Vision, arising through the floor like a medieval demon at an expensive Venetian theatre. To Tony’s credit, he barely twitched at all. His throat tightened.

“No observations if you don’t use doors,” he said. The hot feeling on the back of his neck refused to subside.

Vision sighed audibly. A door opened and closed with what Tony considered to be pedantic ostentation.

“May I—“

“No.”

There was a brief silence. Tony reached for his phone and turned on the house audio: _Run for the Hills_ came blasting from a reproduction set-up that cost roughly the same as a top-range recording studio and which Tony had designed himself. He exhaled through his nose.

“Mr. Stark.”

“No,” said Tony.

The music changed to a recording of what sounded like a peaceful, tranquil rainforest soundscape.

“Not enough chainsaw,” Tony said, switching it back to his own selection. “You know how quickly palm oil plantations rip through decades-old – centuries-old – rainforest? Imagine how much of that is because Stark Industries didn’t think it was _important_ \--“ he jabbed the fingerprint module with more force than it needed, teeth clenched, and it skittered away across the table at the pressure.

“I am aware of the speed of depletion of old wood habitats,” Vision said, with profound concern, “and it is indeed immensely troubling to contemplate the damage to the biosphere, but I think—“

“You’re right,” Tony said, throwing the fingerprint module across the room as he did. “Talking about it won’t fix it. More funding into exploring alternatives.” He pointed a finger at Vision, who wore, today, a v-neck sweater vest. It was Fair Isle. The finger shook. Tony tried to relax the muscles in his neck and jaw. Couldn’t. “I should work on that in more depth. More in depth. Something non-polluting. And the bearings in Rhodey’s exo need to be moved back, the whole track, it doesn’t run smoothly enough, there was something I did in eighty-two that could transfer across—“ he seized up pieces at random from the mess on the table as he spoke, his lungs small, his heart loud.

“Mr Stark, I really do think—“

“No time,” barked Tony, baring his teeth in a smile that felt fixed and stony. He bounded from the room.

* * *

Pepper still hadn’t called.

Pepper wasn’t calling, because he had two hundred and fifty-seven suits in active storage, and he lived in a fortress, and he didn’t steep, and he didn’t stop. She’d been clear on that, in the letter.

Tony took more anti-narcoleptics - generics, because the brand name was a company who’d argued with him last month - and raced through the third edition of Food Additives and Their Chemical Production.

* * *

“No one blames you,” said the Vision, while Tony was reading the side of a Cap'n Crunch box in horrified fascination, half his mind on the pelvic angle of the exo, which he’d determined wasn’t level enough to allow Rhodey to take steps with a more natural gait.

“For the rainforests?” Tony said, his mouth full. “Give ‘em enough time and they will. Every time I breathe _out_ , I’m choking someone – every time I breathe _in_ , stealing their air. I never felt so damn _big_ \--“ He cut himself off. Rubbed his face, and felt the angles, radii, and schemata blur and tug with the skin, distorting his mental diagramming, pulling the internal photograph of the construction into a fun house mirror. “—there’s too much aftertaste in sub three.”

“For doing what you thought was right,” Vision said, watching Tony with his usual intense and unsettling regard. Today he wore a striped, slightly uneven green and grey sweater. Tony had the distressing thought that he’d probably knitted it himself. However laughably depleted the full roster was now: with two people in the Avengers compound who didn’t sleep the hours must be filled somehow. Even Vision must tire of peering into the infinite and making ill-considered assays into the dark depths of the soul of man.

“Well, I was wrong,” Tony muttered, spraying Cap'n Crunch on himself. He’d forgotten to swallow, and the idea of doing so now just made his throat constrict. “And I didn’t, anyhow.”

“No one can be expected to predict every outcome,” said Vision, presumably counting Tony’s molecules as he did – Tony had spent some time trying to estimate how many he might have himself, but the project it related to made his head hurt. “Colonel Rhodes did what he thought was right. So did I. We still believe that it is important to be held accountable to the people we protect—“

“Or fail to,” Tony grumbled. He picked a cereal crumb off his sleeve.

“—but also to _reason_ \- Tony – you cannot win _every_ fight.”

“You think this is about winning?”

“No,” Vision conceded, “I think that—“

“Well unless you’re here to scold me about Tony Stark’s Impossibly Vast Ego,” Tony said, not as facetiously as he meant to, “I don’t want to hear it. That’s what friends do, okay? Keep your damn ego in check, with force if necessary – and get hurt following your stupid goddamn decisions to their logical conclusion—“

“Colonel Rhodes most _emphatically_ does not blame you for a decision he took himself which resulted in _me_ causing him accidental—“

“I don’t want to hear it,” Tony repeated, leaping up in a shower of crunchy breakfast cereal crumbs and seizing the packet as an afterthought, and as a shield. He brandished it as his bright red resident conscience gazed at him unblinkingly. “I have work to do.”

The box vibrated minutely with the tremors in his hand.

* * *

Pepper still hadn’t called. She was at an engagement in Delhi. It was a sane hour in Delhi. Tony ignored his phone and re-read Steve’s letter.

He placed it next to a quotation card that Vision had selected from the ‘A Quote A Day’ card calendar Wanda had sent to him:

> _Complex men who knew how self-sacrifice uplifted the redeemer and cast down the bought, and who held back in his knowledge, might so let a foolish brother take the place of false nobility and its later awakened due of heavier sentence._

He knew the line well, even if he didn’t like the voice actor on the audio book, but on the card someone had transcribed the quote inaccurately. It ended with the word “bought”, and, perhaps due to issues with mistranslation and retranslation via whichever country it had been printed in, replaced the word “self-sacrifice” with “forgiveness”.

* * *

“You go much longer without a public appearance,” Rhodey said, as Tony lined up the rails again, “they’re going to start planning your funeral. _Again_.”

“Good,” said Tony, stepping back to take his arm. “I might even show up and say a few words.” He watched the rolling of metallic joints and the comparative stiffness of bone and sinew ones. “I moved eight and three. They should be smoother. Are you getting enough support?”

Rhodey took a tentative step, his face creased with effort. “Yeah. Are _you_?”

“What?” Tony aimed a pretend kick at his friend. “No, don’t give up after a single step. You did thirty-three yesterday in about—“

“Because I was mad at you, and don’t pretend not to understand me,” Rhodey complained, obliging him with another step. “Call Dr. Running Bear.”

“Who?” Tony watched Rhodey’s slow progress along the rails, his body tense from scalp to sole. Technically he didn’t _need_ to wear the suit for this – he could take Rhodey’s weight, even with the exo, safely for the time it took to lower him into a supported position if anything happened. It just felt a little _more_ safe this way.

“Military psych,” Rhodey grunted. Another step. “I know you’ve heard of her.” Grunt. Step. “Don’t play dumb.”

“You need a referral?” Tony asked. “Whoa—“ he stepped forward as Rhodey teetered, and righted himself.

“You know why,” his friend sighed, and he forced himself forward. “This is hard enough for me, Tony. Don’t make me carry your shit for you too.”

Tony froze, and let Rhodey complete another step alone. Another. Another. 

His face felt like someone had slapped it. He wasn’t short on points of comparison for the experience: one of the many who’d taken a swing at it had even told him he had a “sublimely slappable face”. 

Rhodey made another step, muscles straining with their tender new growth.

“Say something,” he commanded, breathing hard.

“You’re doing great,” Tony said, mechanically.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Rhodey sighed, catching his breath. He paused on the rails, drooping.

“I’m not a goddamn soldier,” Tony muttered, sinking into the collar of his suit. “No, don’t tell me that was petulant, I heard it.”

“You know,” Rhodey said, taking one more slow, laborious step, sweat on his face, “your huge ego got you this far.”

“It got _you_ this far—“ Tony began, heated.

“God _damn_ it, Tony!” Rhodey snapped, seizing both the rails to keep himself locked upright. “My decisions are _mine_! I am a _Colonel_. I make decisions that affect other people every day of my working life and _I_ make them. _Me_. You don’t take responsibility for my thoughts like I’m some kind of child. Just because _you’re_ smart doesn’t make _me_ dumb.” Rhodey raised a finger warningly, and his arm hardly shook at all. “Just because _you’re_ powerful doesn’t make _me_ weak. Now I’m going to take a whole bunch of steps—“

He did this, sliding his hands carefully along the rail, Tony shadowing him like an anxious fath—like a coach. A sports coach. Rhodey stopped, panting from the effort.

“And I’m not going to yell any more,” he added, quieter, softer. Sweat rolled down the side of his face. “See the psychiatrist, Tony.”

“I don’t want to be The Superhero Who Has A Shrink,” Tony grumbled. “Not _again_. I’m already The Asshole, do I have to be the Self-Pitying Asshole, too?”

“You’re only the asshole maybe half the time,” Rhodey said, with the beginnings of an exhausted smile.

“Half? That’s generous.”

“Sixty-five percent.”

“You’re way kinder than Pepper. She gave me eighty. I should have proposed to you instead,” Tony said, with a grimace at the sound of her name, at the stab of acid deep in his chest, at the immediate insistent drumbeat in his mind: _is she okay where is she what if something happened to her what if I’m not there--_

“Good luck finding a gown that’ll fit over this,” Rhodey pointed out, leaning on the rails. 

“I know tailors.”

“How come you don’t make some use of them yourself?” Rhodey asked, with the irony appropriate when addressing a man vainer than a peacock who’d spent more on high-end tailored suits than some countries had on their defence budgets last year. “It’s standard mission procedure, Tony. See the combat psych.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Tony repeated, his jaw tightening until his ears popped and his vision began to swim. “I _make_ things. I make things, and they just make everything worse, and I can’t make _amends_ , ever, and half the world just wants a hunk to punch things in the face and say ‘sorry’ a bit any how and – is there a Captain Canada? I bet that would go over real well with the UN – I – I – I _make_ stuff, Rhodey, I don’t need to see a – I make _speeches_ , too, okay, yes, but—“

“Scared something might be wrong with you for real?” Rhodey asked, leaning hard on the rails with the sympathy of a man who had been passed as a hundred percent mentally fit on every occasion _despite_ his continued association with Tony. “Every time I see her, after a mission, I’m sure she’s going to say ‘this is it, you can’t go out again, your head’s a mess’.” He looked down at himself. “I guess my body beat my head to it.”

Tony flinched his recognition of the destruction he’d had a significant hand in, but only said, “Scared _nothing_ is,” and couldn’t make the suit sit down.

“Don’t be,” Rhodey said, dryly. “The state of Denmark is rotten right through.”

Tony gave him a thin smile. “ _Your only problem is your ego, Mr Stark._ ”

“She won’t.”

“Then she’s lying,” Tony sighed. “Mr Stark’s only issue is that he’s rich and thinks he can get his own way all the time, and his ego is so big he thinks he can make decisions for the rest of the world. Cry me a river, Mr Stark: you were raised by a good man, why can’t you be more like him?” He caught himself with a grimace, and waved his hand in admonishment. “Oh no. No, no. _You’re_ trying to get out of finishing this walk. I got your number.”

“Guilty,” Rhodey said, with humour Tony recognised as forced and a look he didn’t want to recognise as concern. “You got me. Let’s go. I’m rested.”

* * *

Pepper still hadn’t called.

* * *

“People just don’t trust a Damascene conversion,” said the TV. “You know, once someone diverts their cause once – flip-flops – who’s to say they won’t do it again?”

Tony air-cleaned another bearing. It was a rerun. No one held debates like this at 4am.

“It’s called changing your mind when faced with new evidence,” said an irritable British man with ebullient hair Tony was sure he’d seen Bruce speaking to before. He made a note to find out what this guy did, and fund it. He stopped halfway through the note with a sick feeling.

“When it’s convenient,” sneered the first voice. “For plaudits. When you stand nothing to lose.”

“This mentality hardly affords much room for redemption,” objected a third voice. It was familiar: there was also a studio hush when it spoke.

Tony looked up in surprise to see the King of Wakanda sitting behind a panel in a charcoal suit, flanked by a bizarre array of guests drawn from all over various media. The network logo was small, unobtrusive, and _un_ familiar.

“Redemption is untrustworthy,” said the first voice. She was American, white, sincere, with dyed red hair and, Tony estimated without much interest, a BMI of well over forty. “It’s marketing for villains. ‘How can I make myself look good and win _trust_?', dreamt up by maniacs.”

“And yet converts,” said the British man, “are the most zealous. They have the most to prove. Politically, they’re the ones prone to fanaticism, everywhere on the scale. Fanatical evil, sure, but also fanatical _good_.”

His Majesty T’Challa, King of Wakanda, the Black Panther, Protector of His Nation, as identified by his rather long name on the desk, waved this away. “By offering no hope of redemption or forgiveness we condemn our enemies and those in dispute to despair, and a man in despair is the most dangerous fanatic at all. He feels he can lose nothing.”

“So you’re saying just _embrace_ these people?” spluttered the American woman. “Sorry, but didn’t that end in death for Wakandans—“

There was a murmur from the audience. Tony air-cleaned another bearing without watching what he was doing.

“They died believing that what they were doing was right,” T’Challa said, gravely, and with only the smallest note of displeasure. “As any fanatic, any villain, any hero may do. We mourn them as we mourn the death of every Wakandan, as my family; my father died believing in the extension of the hand of diplomacy; perhaps, however, you are aware of the phrase, _a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it_? Oscar Wilde, if I recall.”

“Now you’re saying diplomacy is bad?” she hazarded. Tony, who recognised the form of pretended ignorance to drive the conversation in a direction it had no intention of going, snorted.

“I only say that, on the balance, I side with the doctor. A man who wishes to redeem his past misdeeds is more valuable than a man who has never been shown to be wrong – it is in how we respond to our errors that our growth is made and displayed, and in which we demonstrate our finest nature.”

“Besides,” said another American woman on the panel, who had not spoken yet, adjusting her lapel mic as if it pained her, “if you punish someone ceaselessly for ‘being wrong’, but never allow them their grace in ‘being right’, well—“

“Then you are my father,” Tony muttered, automatically inserting his usual stock flippancy without thinking.

“—you risk creating a personality disorder, and that is deeply unethical.”

Tony muted the TV, caught in a sickening moment of another TV screen, driven there by his own words: a crashing car. A woman pleading. The slam of a car door, over and over and over and over. The unwavering eyes of James Buchanan Barnes. The look on Steve’s face as he said _yes, I knew_.

Tony didn’t bother to think, _why is what I lose worth nothing? Why doesn’t it matter who I lose?_ as he stumbled to the bathroom. It was only after he’d vomited – stomach bile, whiskey, coffee, air – and sunk glaze-eyed to the floor between the toilet and the wall that he wondered who had turned the TV on in the first place.

* * *

Pepper hadn’t called today, either.

Bruce had.

“I went drinking with Thor,” said the voicemail, in tones of wincing and undisguised hangover. “I figured if anyone can keep the Other Guy in check, if things got out of – anyway, I feel like half of Harlem fell on _me_ , so I guess that’s… payback…”

“So I won’t be able to make it this afternoon, Tony, I’m sorry,” Tony said, along with the message.

He laid the phone back on the invitations for Pepper, the letter from Steve, the antique pens laden with symbolic meaning, the case holding the most expensive engagement ring ever commissioned, studded with fourteen bright red diamonds surrounding and climbing over a deep green opal, the quotation card from Wanda by way of Vision.

One of the invitations to Pepper slid off the pile and onto the floor. Tony picked it up, and stuck it behind the pens.

* * *

“Time for mutual torture,” Rhodey said, as Tony helped him slowly into the exo. He turned a clear-eyed look to Tony and said, with an air of awkward and heartfelt apology, “I’ll go easy on you, if you promise _not_ to go easy on me, deal?”

“See,” Tony said, armoured from neck to toe, sweating in a thin t-shirt, “now you’re just flirting.”

“If I were _flirting_ ,” said Rhodey, sternly, “I’d have said it the other way around.” He took Tony’s hand under his armpit to lift him with equanimity; with an assisted heave, he left the bed.

“Ugh,” Tony let him get his balance alone, until Rhodey gave the little jerk of his chin that indicated he was ready to walk. “You know too much. I should have let you die.”

“Me and every third person in the world,” Rhodey retorted, making his first, wobbling step to the rail, as Tony stood directly behind him and muttered gentle, affectionate threats of immediate death and dismemberment. “I hope you don’t think you’re subtle.”

“I fly around in a bright red and gold tin can with jets for feet,” Tony said, with a brief thump to his sternum for emphasis, “I am, oh, infinitely subtle. Beyond subtle. I’m an actual wallflower. The master of permanent camouflage.”

Rhodey snorted, and grasped the rail with triumph.

“That,” said Tony, “is a point three seven two two one nine percent improvement on yesterday’s time.” The optimism did not penetrate the suit. He felt like a hollow space, scooped out, distant, as Rhodey pulled himself stiffly along the rail. “Hey, Stumbling Duty, move those pins,” he added, at the appropriate juncture.

“When did you last sleep?” Rhodey asked, when Tony had called the nurse back, and the exo was back in its case, ready for another round of adjustments.

“Hey,” Tony objected, leaning around Theresa Janus, firm-handed and firm-glared nurse, “no babying me or I’ll baby _you_.”

“Humour me,” said Rhodey cheerfully.

“Or what, you’ll get up and kick my ass?”

“I’ll do something you _won’t_ enjoy, even,” said Rhodey.

“No can do. I will only humour you _after_ you kick my ass,” Tony said, backing out of the room.

* * *

“Reports of my death,” Tony said, from inside the air conditioning duct, the welding mask making his voice echo, “are grossly optimistic. Did you know, the current grille just comes off if you give it about forty-seven mph of a kick? And we _don’t_ have one at the wall division for every internal room? Anyone could get in.”

“Some people,” said Vision, his implacable red face protruding through the titanium floor, up to the collarbones, “might consider your precautions excessive, Mr Stark.”

“Some people haven’t had their house _blown up_ as much as I have,” Tony retorted. He reached for the secondary grille, and couldn’t find it. “If you’re going to phase through my duct you can make yourself useful and pass me that grille before I end up sticking this torch into my own arm. That came out wrong.”

Vision’s hand protruded through the metal floor, and the grille pressed into Tony’s fingertips as Vision’s wrist passed, like cool static, through his bones.

“Did I just hear an alarm?” Tony added, freezing in place with his heart in his mouth. “Perimeter alarm – third floor – it’s gone off – where’s –“

“No, you did not,” said Vision, and corrected himself with the less-than reassuring words, “or if you did, it wasn’t because it went off.”

Tony pushed up the mask with the back of his hand and switched off the torch: he found it already resting in Vision’s palm. The narrow metal shaft enclosed him like a coffin; his ribs enclosed his lungs; his tongue a vast, alien creature in his mouth, stoppering his throat; the taste of acid; car tires; car doors; _yes, I knew_ ; the minute detail of hairs on the backs of Obediah Stanes’ hands, lifting up a four-year-old Tony in Howard’s absence again; the deep red crescents blooming in his palms; an endless stream of lightning-fast impressions passing through his mind, shifting like quicksand whenever he tried to focus on them; snow tires space water fire –

“Should I fetch a glass of water?” Vision asked, as they sank down through the ceiling panels, through the air, making a mockery of Tony’s fortifications, and came to rest on the couch as if it were the only solid thing in a world of ghosts. Tony’s throat closed – he held his hand over his mouth – 

White, short lines on the dark blue cable’s of Vision’s stupid, inappropriate sweater, vast as the universe.

“I’m told that it can be beneficial to concentrate on the speed of inhalation and exhalation,” Vision added.

 _Why_ , Tony thought angrily, his battered heart wounding itself on his ribs at speeds that race cars couldn’t achieve, even the ones he made, _so I can know how badly I’m fucking **that**_ up too?

“Is that _cat hair_?” he asked aloud, when Vision handed him a glass of unpalatably frigid water. “It’s cat hair. How long have you had a _cat_?”

“About a week,” said Vision, mildly. “She is still settling in so I don’t let her out of the room. Her name is Irene. She is grey.”

“Are you going to show me pictures,” Tony inquired, regarding his own hands with faint horror. He’d singed the hairs on their back without noticing. His skin was beginning to bubble and blister. He suspected the frigidity of the glass was intended for his hand, not his mouth.

“I have ice,” said Vision.

“No cat photos,” Tony warned him.

“Ice,” Vision repeated.

“You _miss_ her,” Tony said accusingly, as ice was applied, painfully, to his hand. “You’re broody and you’ve bought a cat to go with your _knitting_.”

“I have no desire to reproduce,” Vision said, holding the ice in place. “Indeed I’m not sure that I can. But yes, I believe I miss Wanda.”

“So you replaced her with a cat so you can have something to care for,” Tony said, in minor triumph at being able to construct simple cause and effect while his blood still surged in his ears. “Broody.”

“To have something that will _let_ me care for it,” Vision said, as Tony yanked his hand away from the ice, “perhaps.”

Tony didn’t rise to it. “I need to finish the job.”

“Irene also scratches, or attempts to,” said Vision. “It is debatable if the ducts _need_ double-thickness tempered grilles, Mr Stark.”

* * *

Pepper hadn’t called; neither had Bruce. 

Another invitation arrived for Miss Potts, and one for Colonel Rhodes, care of Stark Towers. 

Tony delivered the latter to Rhodey’s bedside and returned to work on the next suit generation’s improved cooling system while the TV quietly displayed select highlights from the Women’s Open.

After the ads, a man with impossibly beautiful huge brown eyes and a New York accent addressed a hand-held microphone with a yellow foam cover in silence. Tony leaned on the sound control as he reached to throw something at Dummy Mk Delta, and the sound came on. 

“---good isn’t something you _are_ ,” quoted the young man, “it’s something you _do_. Like the woman said. It’s like redemption, like anything, it’s a process. That’s what I tell these kids. This country is hung up on a narrative of purity in poverty and it’s wrong – sure there’s _types_ of poverty but they’re not the ‘good poor and the bad poor,’ whatever your parameters for financial poverty are – there’s the poverty of finances but there’s also the poverty of the mind and soul and that permeates no matter how high up you go – it’s what we learn, Mr Koenig –“

“What we learn?”

Tony laid out the piping section and sprayed it, very gingerly, with SmartHydro. 

“It’s harder to unlearn things when you get older,” said the young man, with heart-breaking sincerity. “This is why youth programmes are important. But it’s _too_ easy to learn when you’re really young. The younger you are, the more indirect learning you do.”

“I don’t follow—“

“Listen, you take two poor kids on the same street, and one turns out to be an astronaut and one goes to jail, and you say, ‘they both had the same opportunities’, and the astronaut says, ‘hey, _I_ was poor and _I_ never turned out like that’ – you have the myth of equivalence drawn from ignorance of circumstances, you see? Even in the same family you get the Good Kid and the Bad Kid, and their parents will tell you they raised them both ‘exactly the same’, well, Mr Koenig, that’s _impossible_ \--“

“Because you never have the same circumstances twice,” Tony said, under his breath, laying out another section. “Or there are no do-overs, as Da—there are no do-overs.”

“—so your astronaut kid learns, ‘never stop striving, fight for what you want, and you will get it’ in their home, and prison kid learns, ‘no matter what you do, you will never be good enough’ in theirs, for whatever. Mom’s love, never good enough to escape being hit, to compete with, with the TV.”

“Bad parenting isn’t an excuse—“ began Mr Koenig, whom Tony was beginning to dislike.

“It’s a _factor_ ,” said the young man, hanging onto the microphone as it if was about to be taken away from him, “and telling these boys they’re to blame for what’s been done to them isn’t a _solution_ either.”

“What about people who’ve had every advantage in life and still—“ Mr Koenig began.

“Like Tony Stark,” Tony mouthed, sarcastically, and he sprayed the second section.

“I’d question how much you can truly know about the pain someone else has experienced and what they learnt when they were still becoming a person,” said the interviewee. “People who learn ‘my way or Hell’ in every faith cause _terrible pain_ but they _can change_.”

“One more thing, Mr Small,“ Koenig said, to Tony’s annoyance. “Were you the Good Kid or the Bad Kid in your house?”

“I was the Bad Kid,” the interviewee said, staring down the camera lens, “and my brother was the Good Kid, and we _both_ went to prison, because artificial divisions ffff----screw everyone up.”

Tony waved his hand into RemoteSpace, and grabbed the tooth pick he was using to draw the groove the microchannels were to grown on. Forty thousand bucks a week on developing SmartHydro manipulation tools for labs and here he was using a tooth pick to draw… increasingly wobbly lines.

* * *

The letter lay on the table like a swear word so ugly that it distorted the air around it. “Tony Stark” on the envelope in neat, fountain pen handwriting completely unlike the chicken scratch hieroglyphs of Tony’s private garbage language that only Pepper had ever been able to reasonably decipher. 

Tony checked his phone. There were forty messages but none from anyone he remotely wanted to talk to, especially the one from Sam Wilson reading “we need to talk, urgent” and the one from Cate Bree at Stark Enterprises asking if he was really going to okay funding for this, that, and that youth programme in NYC that it had taken her all week for find out the name of based on Tony’s hazy remembrance of who was working on it.

He went into the basement, and began to draw growth tracks on another bed of SmartHydro with a tool he’d originally developed to help patients with Parkinson’s.

“Maybe I should have blood tests,” Tony told the empty room, already aware that he had been tested, again, for every known hereditary and acquired disease it was possible to think of. 

Twelve hours later he returned to the sunlit levels, now blazing with bright daylight, to find a sandwich. The letter was still there, and Pepper still hadn’t called.

* * *

“You should open your mail,” said Rhodey, stumbling between the rails.

“Oh yeah? You open yours?”

“Invitation to go speak at the international conference on revolutionary prosthetics,” Rhodey said, “I turned them down. I don’t think I’m cut out for valedictory speaking.”

“That and your prosthetics are still in the realm of the regime, not the revolution,” said Tony, watching where Rhodey’s weight fell with concern. “Okay, stop, you need readjustment under your left foot, it’s screwing up your step.”

“My _pelvis_ is screwing up my step,” said Rhodey, “the exo is trying to compensate.”

“Whatever,” Tony said struggling down to his knees in the suit, a screwdriver already in hand. “Yikes, that’s… not good… no… Are you and our privacy-deficient friend talking about me behind my back?”

“Ow,” said Rhodey.

“What, what’d I do?”

“I tried to shrug,” Rhodey said, half-laughing, “and I won’t try again.”

“So you _are_ gossiping about my mail-opening habits.”

“Tony,” said Rhodey, exasperated. “I lie on my back in a painkiller fug for twenty hours of the day and you never leave the compound, what _else_ is there to talk about?”

“I dunno, philosophy? Politics? Girls?” Tony grunted, shunting along three levers in quick succession while propping Rhodey’s foot up with his wrist. “His _cat_?”

“I never want to hear about that cat again,” said Rhodey with such emphatic sincerity that Tony almost laughed. “And I can’t talk politics until I can move enough to punch a wall.”

“Try it now.” Tony pulled back from the exo’s foot. “How’s that?”

“Could use more cushioning. Pneumatics. Right now it’s correcting for my step but –“

“It’s also jarring your skeleton,” Tony finished, scowling at the leg of the exo, trying to call immediately to mind the precise angle and poise, volume, and capacity of what needed to be changed. “I don’t have to open it.”

“You don’t _have_ to do this, either,” Rhodey pointed out. “I could learn to walk with the hospital equipment.”

“ _I_ broke you,” Tony said, “ _I’m_ fixing you.”

“See now you’re just being an asshole again.”

“You know it’s just going to be another high-minded lecture about how we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good and he’s not sorry because he didn’t do anything wrong,” Tony sad, into the collar of the suit. “Aerogel bed and some kind of compression system?”

“You’re the engineer,” Rhodey said, simply. “You do what you think is best.”

“Aerogel,” Tony agreed, sketching out the shape in his mind. “And I’m not opening my damn mail.”

* * *

The letter read,

> _Tony. You did what you thought was right and so did I. We’re not enemies. Steve._

“We’re not friends either,” said Tony, folding the letter in half. He put it under the case for the engagement ring.

* * *

The mail continued to sink tendrils of discomfort into Tony’s waking life, which was currently all of Tony’s life: the invitation was printed on thick white card. It was expensive. There was a glyph in the shape of a highly stylised leaping cat - the crest of the Royal House of Wakanda. It was signed with an ink that shimmered, very slightly, and the card weighed –

“Can we get some kind of _analysis_ of this?” Tony frowned, staring past the words. The house sensors should not have let something potentially incendiary in, but they’d over enthusiastically incinerated a sashimi delivery for Theresa Janus the day before and she’d told him in no uncertain terms to turn the damn things to a less excited level or get a new nurse.

“It shouldn’t be necessary,” said the Vision, looping thick green tweed wool around pair of plastic needles, over and over. “It’s the Word of Wakanda. The reigning king shows a document is official by signing in a suspension of microscopic vibranium in ink. An old tradition.”

“Since when did you know so much about Wakandan traditions?”

“There have been rather a lot of documentaries,” Vision said, demurring, “since they decided to start talking to the outside world. People like to have context for their relations with unknown nations, and of course, never having been colonised, the Kingdom of Wakanda has a markedly different history to many of its neighbours, one which modern non-Wakandan historians are rightly beguiled by—“

Tony pressed down on his sinuses with his fingertips. “The knitting _or_ the discourse, not both.”

“Does the knitting bother you?”

Tony waved his hand aimlessly. He didn’t say anything about the sound of clicking needles scraping across his nerves, or their similarity to the clicking and ticking of unknown devices, or the way their movements caught the corner of his eye and sent electric impulses through parts of his brain that no longer knew how to shut up. He only said, “So it’s a display of power.”

“And wealth, yes.” Vision carefully laid his knitting down. “It is intended to demonstrate the validity of the document because only the House of Wakanda, traditionally, could manipulate vibranium, but it also is meant to showcase the wealth and therefore supreme power of the Kingdom. Less in use, I suppose, since they elected to cut off all contact so many centuries ago.”

“And the knitting?”

“It is called subliminating,” said Vision, picking it up again, “but I can stop if the noise is bothering you.”

“Pepper is the head of this business, not me,” said Tony, tapping the card against his lips. It smelled, innocuously, of new paper. “This should be an invitation to her.”

“Perhaps His Majesty has business he wishes specifically to discuss with you,” suggested Vision. “It is, after all, you whom he has met.”

“What a great experience that was for him,” Tony said, sarcasm flowing from his tongue like saliva at the sight of a meal. “I’m too busy. The house sensors need rewiring. Rhodey’s exo has to have a second layer in the gel bed for the cushioning to be effective, and the SmartHydro circuits won’t draw themselves.”

“It might be wise to –“

“To keep my head down,” Tony said, interrupting, “and stay away from loud noises and foreign travel.”

* * *

“Tony?” said Pepper, her voice laden with something Tony recognised immediately as anxiety. He wanted to kick himself. He’d said he wasn’t going to do this. He’d sworn he wasn’t going to do this. Space was space, and space was something defined by the absence of Tony Stark.

He’d also promised himself he wasn’t going to cling to the handset like a drowning man but he wasn’t stupid; he knew there were limits to his self-control. He knew he was going to end up like this, lying face-down on the couch with his eyes closed, trying to record the sound of her voice into his brain forever, trying to rewrite every memory so that she lay across them like a filter.

“I need your advice,” he said, muffled by cushions that needed laundering. 

She sighed. “That’s not my job any more.”

“I know, I’m sorry, this was a terrible, terrible idea, and I’m very, very sorry…”

The burn on the back of his hand ached. 

“What happened?” Pepper prompted. “I mean, I know what happened, what they said happened on the news, I saw – I can guess what happened, but what, what happened? Are you – damnit, I said I wasn’t going to ask that.”

Tony held his breath.

She sucked hers in. “Why. Have you called me.”

“I got an invitation to visit T’Challa Wakanda,” said Tony, as honestly as the open-ended question allowed. He stuffed his burnt hand under the couch cushion and lay on it until the pain became a gentle background note in the conversation, a deserved pressure instead of a distraction. “Are you okay right now? Is there anything you need, anyone you—“

“Tony.”

“An invitation,” Tony reiterated, lying on his hand more deliberately. 

“Deep navy woollen, cream cotton, gunmetal leather, don’t wear French cuffs, the Pour O’r Galliano scent,” Pepper said promptly. “Don’t put anything in your hair – augh, no. No, no. _This_ is why you called me?”

“No,” said Tony, into the cushions. “I wanted to know if I should go but you just told me what to wear, which means you think I should go, right?”

“No,” said Pepper. “It means I have some old habits I haven’t gotten out of yet. Tony, please. You have to make your own decision.”

“My decisions are always bad,” Tony said, turning his hand under the couch cushion until the soft surface abraded the blistered skin, rubbing dirt into the wound. “Always. One hundred percent inevitably, that’s why you, that’s why your input was always, that’s why I ne—“

“You have to do this yourself,” Pepper said, exasperated beyond restraint but still keeping her voice down. “I am _not_ a coin you flip to –“

“No, no, I just wanted advice, I just,” Tony murmured, desperately.

“My advice? Oh my _God_ , Tony, you’ve already heard my advice and you ignored it, you keep ignoring it! I said _stop making suits_ , I said _stop running around the world fighting fires you didn’t start_ , I said you are an _engineer_ not a _soldier_ , you have to stop – stop – stop putting yourself, stop putting _me_ through this –“ she caught her breath, and Tony heard the shameful, heart-squeezing sound of partially-shed tears in the inhalation. Her next outbreath was shaky. “If you go,” she said, and he imagined her closing her eyes, counting to ten. “Deep navy woollen. And don’t call me again.”

“Will you –“

“ _Yes_ , Tony,” Pepper said, with such sorrow that Tony wanted to pull his hand out from under the cushion and punch himself in the head – he settled for biting his tongue hard enough that he began to taste colours – and she took another little breath in the silence of his agony. “I will call you. The minute. The _second_. I change my mind.”

The phone rang off without a goodbye.

* * *

The Aerogel bed, layered twice, with interlocking compression, worked so well that Tony returned the idea to the current suit. 

“I’m going to have to reroute every single one of the SmartHydro beds now,” he said, with the satisfaction of someone who had never had to care that he was spending upwards of thirty thousand dollars every time he did this. The SmartHydro could at least be reused in universities for study…

Tony cleared off his work bench, pulled up the schematic he’d tweaked about eight hours and three anti-narcoleptics ago, and began gently erasing the pinprick-wide channels, inflating them to the size of his head in focus as he went.

“Boom,” Tony said, looking up.

Four hours had passed. His hand itched.

The TV screen above the work bench flicked on, silent and pale blue, bringing up two white faces talking to one black one that was attached to a much better-dressed body –

“I did _not_ turn that on,” said Tony, aloud.

He picked up a screwdriver. 

“And I disabled RemoteSpace after the last time,” he said, looking around the room.

The TV flicked off again, guiltily.

“It’s a good thing I don’t believe in ghosts,” Tony went on, twirling the screwdriver up and down his fingers with what felt like significant self-restraint. “Because I can see this freaking the bejesus out of someone a little more supernaturally-minded.”

Tony reached down and closed the schemata with a gesture.

“Materialise, for Christ’s sake, I hate talking to empty air.”

Vision passed through the wall in front of him, looking for all the world like a peeled man rising in a sea of milk. Tony nearly choked on his tongue.

“ _Doors_ ,” he croaked. “This is not good for me.”

“I agree,” said Vision, standing with his head bowed. “None of this is good for you. Also, I do not dissipate so much as--”

“Alter the phase of your molecular vibration in order to occupy different material states, yes, I know.”

Tony squinted. The angular, blood-coloured head now rose above a sweater which had levelled up in knitting terms considerably; there was an exploded diagram of a nuclear reactor picked out in minute silver thread. 

“What,” Tony said, pointing the screwdriver at him, “were you going to do if I wasn’t near a TV when your Helpful Broadcasts were on? Usher me? Float a TV over?”

Vision said, “Oh, they’re pre-recorded.”

Tony took a depth breath. He let it go again. “Right,” he said, scratching his eyebrow with the handle of the screwdriver. “Okay.”

“You’re angry.”

“I don’t like it when people try to manipulate me – yes, I know everyone tries to manipulate me all the damn time because I have giant, huge, world-beating issues that everyone can see and touch and feel and prod and get me into a goddamn corner – I am going to swear properly in a minute and I know you don’t like that but –“

“Please,” said Vision, making a small go-ahead gesture with his hand, “I have probably earnt it.”

“—could you not have FUCKING asked instead of trying to After School Special me obliquely through TV recordings – how did you even find them, did you sit down with the EPG and a psych text book for – I don’t want to – fuck –“ Tony sat on his heels and put his head in his hands. He pointed the screwdriver between his fingers. “Do not do this.”

“You would not have listened to a direct approach,” Vision said, “nevertheless, you are right, and I am ashamed of myself.”

“I’m right, am I?”

“It was inconsiderate of your autonomy to attempt to manipulate your progress through timed intervention strategy,” said Vision, “and I have witnessed your insistence on working _with_ Colonel Rhodes’s desires rather than against them in the matter of his recovery, which seems a much more fruitful and less… invasive approach.”

“I wouldn’t have listened,” Tony agreed, the screwdriver stabbing him in the head a little. 

“Also, I used the internet,” said Vision, “which was very unpleasant.”

“Isn’t it always,” Tony muttered, unwilling to stand up straight. The pressure of his knees against his lungs and the sense of the room about to collapse upon him, more than the ability to acknowledge how ridiculous he looked, eventually drove him to get up. “I guess you’re not going to tell me what you hoped to achieve.”

“It was my observation,” said Vision, with a sickly smile, “that you would not have taken kindly to an up-front acknowledgement that your mental health has suffered dramatically in the last few months. Even considering the fragile state it was in before—“

“It’s not exactly a secret,” Tony said, putting the screwdriver down carefully. “Look at that. It’s still shaking. I can’t sle—won’t sleep. Every decision I make is a bad one. Every noise I hear is a crash. I’m not okay. That _doesn’t matter_.”

Vision took the force of the shout, which took even Tony by surprise, with equanimity. He put his hands behind his back. “It ought to.”

“Well, it doesn’t.”

“Yes,” said Vision, as if Tony were carrying out a different conversation, “I have been reading about this. You won’t acknowledge that it has any importance unless someone else confirms it first. I had hoped that I might be able to confirm it for you, but Colonel Rhodes informed me that you had already rejected his attempts—“

“You _are_ talking about me.” Tony felt the shameful stab of gratitude collide with the expected sense of bitterness and leave his mouth dry. He bit down on the tirade that was coming. Four hundred words a second, vituperative, furious, spiteful, a whirlwind that would tear down any argument Vision cared to construct, and find whatever feelings the thing possessed and rake across them like a whiplash of fire—he could already picture the look of patient, wounded puzzlement—

“We are worried about you,” Vision said, simply. “Who would have to notice?”

“I – what?” Tony chewed the inside of his mouth.

“Who would have to notice you were not okay for it to matter that you are not okay?”

Tony picked up the screwdriver again. “I am going to throw this.”

“Would you prefer if I remained in a solid phase so that it strikes me?” Vision asked, apparently without sarcasm. “Would that help?”

Tony put the screwdriver down.

“Miss Potts?” Vision suggested.

“If you listened to—“ Tony barked, puffing up. 

“I have not listened,” said Vision, raising his hands, “to any conversations you have had where I was not visibly present, as I promised.” He looked so ridiculous, so ineffably harmless and so threatening all at once, blood red and wide-eyed, gentle-voiced and silly-sweatered, impossibly powerful and eternally baffled, _doing his best_ , that Tony wished he could find it in him to produce even the slightest iota of a fuck whether this project of his succeeded. _How do you fix a problem like Tony Stark_?

“Alright,” Tony said, deflating miserably. “I’ll go to Wakanda.”

* * *

Wakanda airfield was, the pilot assured him, virtually impossible for non-Wakandan pilots to land on without extensive training. 

“That,” said Tony, “is because you have put it in a stupid place.”

He went back to his seat and tried to ignore the fact that every single miniature bottle in the plane’s minibar contained something non-alcoholic.

The head of Wakandan Security stared down at Tony from her six inch advantage on him, and Tony, who was used to having to look up at several women of his acquaintance anyway, wished to God there was some inoffensive way he could explain how utterly, utterly, utterly breath-taking she looked. He maintained eye-contact while he was frisked, scanned, and given a peremptory clearance once his internal technology had been suitably sneered at for its ‘antiquated’ method and construction.

“Mr Stark,” said the head of Wakandan Security, as he followed her towards the Reception Room, through the beautifully Wakandan Modern blend of extremely old carvings and extremely high-tech illumination of those carvings, through the exaggerated portraits of former Kings – male and female – of Wakanda, in whose faces it was possible to see elements of T’Challa here and there, and their holographic reproductions in more life-like style, augmented with short animations on the history of— “Mr Stark,” she repeated.

“Sorry,” Tony said, with his best ingratiating smile. “I enjoy learning.”

“It is customary to genuflect before the King,” she said, “to refrain from prolonged eye-contact, and to maintain a distance of six feet away.”

“He’s already punched me enough times,” Tony assured her, “I don’t need telling not to get within punching range.”

Her expression did not flicker. “You will _not_ enquire as to the method or construction of any Wakandan technology,” she added, “and you will _not_ insult the person of the king or his domain.”

 _I won’t **need** to ask_ , Tony thought, without affecting much of what people thought of as his arrogance. Aloud, he said, “My mother raised me to have manners,” with the customary pang of regret for having opened his big mouth which accompanied every mention of her now. 

“I am sure she was a conscientious and intelligent woman,” said the head of Wakandan Security, as they reached a vast metal door – no prizes for guessing which metal – without a single nick or dent or panel in it. This much vibratium would cost more than the defence budget for most of the EU, Tony reckoned. It was an impressive display.

He tried not to think about what she’d said.

“His Majesty T’Challa, King of Wakanda, defender of the people, embodiment of the Black Panther,” she said, as the door opened on its own.

“We’ve met,” muttered Tony, “I told you, he punched me. In the face.”

“Mr Tony Stark,” she said, raising her eyebrows, and her voice, “major shareholder in Stark Enterprises and non-executive director, head of the Stark Foundation, friend of this house.”

“Did you read all that on Wikipedia?” Tony asked, out of the corner of his mouth.

“Welcome,” said T’Challa, who was not sitting on a throne, nor was a throne in evidence.

Tony regarded the small room with some surprised. “This doesn’t look very ceremonial.” He referred both to the low ceiling, the comfortable office chairs, and the soft grey carpet; and to the simple, Mandarin-necked black jacket, white t-shirt, and dark jeans worn by the King of Wakanda. As one devotee of good tailoring to another, however, he recognised the art that had gone into the creation of the outfit, and internally offered up a prayer of thanks for Pepper’s automatic clothing choices.

“In the Receiving Room,” T’Challa said, “I bring guests I wish to befriend, not impress. You are to be put at ease.” He raised his eyebrows slightly at his head of security, who nodded, and withdrew.

The door closed behind her.

Tony got the overpowering sense of Principal’s Office.

“That’s okay,” Tony said, walking around the room slowly, running his fingers over the walls. “I’m at ease with state visits. Or I _was_ , until—“

“Until people took to kidnapping you,” T’Challa said. “The story is well-known.”

Tony paused, and looked at his fingers on the perfectly clean walls. The oils on his fingertips hadn’t so much as streaked the surface. “It’s _true_.”

“My sympathies,” said T’Challa, perfectly upright in an elegantly-engineered chair. “There are hidden pressures in growing up the son of a powerful man. Advantages, yes, but always responsibilities rise to meet the advantages face to face.”

“Eventually,” said Tony, still looking at the wall. The motion of tiny, tiny particles of paint – healing behind his fingers – gave him a dizzying sense of scale.

“In Wakanda we also have an acute sense of balance in life,” T’Challa agreed, “But I will not try your patience, Mr Stark. I wish to extend the hand of friendship to you.”

Tony removed his hand from the wall and turned to where T’Challa had once again risen from his seat. “That doesn’t end so well for you, does it?”

“It doesn’t seem to end well for you as often as it might,” the King said, softly. He held out his hand. “We are not men to be discouraged from an enterprise merely because it is hard, Mr Stark. Neither you nor I. If anything, the difficulty convinces us that the road is the right one.”

“Yeah, I used to think that,” Tony said, putting his hand in his pocket. “But right now: no. No road is better than the one that leaves my friends in pieces.”

T’Challa nodded. He kept his hand raised, and open. “Because of decisions my father took, several of our citizens lost their lives in a diplomatic visit to Nigeria. We consulted their families: they believe we should continue to reach out to the world and offer what we can share to help those less fortunate than ourselves.”

Tony grimaced. “You mean because of actions _the Avengers_ undertook. Your people wouldn’t have been killed at all – none of those people would have – if not for us. We dropped a damn building on Hydra and we didn’t crush them hard enough, even with all the _additional lives_ that go lost trying to take them down; the debris flew half-way around the world to hit Nigeria, to hit Wakanda.”

“Mr Stark,” T’Challa said, in a low, soft voice with just a hint of warning. “I suspect I am not the first to say this to you and I will not be the last: you have no right to remove the responsibilities of others for their own actions in order to inflate your own guilt.” He reiterated the offer of his hand without another word, dropping his gaze to Tony’s pocket.

“You’ve heard of the phrase _everything I touch turns to shit_?” Tony asked, shuffling backward. “Wakanda needs nothing from me; your country could rise up and wipe everything I’ve done off the map tomorrow.”

T’Challa raised his eyebrow. “We _need_ nothing from you. The state of Wakanda is rich, replete with resources, rich in mind, rich in spirit, rich in history, rich in literature, rich in art. We are also _generous_.”

“I don’t need—“ Tony began, recognising in T’Challa’s speech his own showy _I’ll fund it, just get on with it, jeez_ atrocities reflected back with a thousand times the class. It was, as he’d told the Vision, a display of power, and one without the usual vulgarity.

“The State of Wakanda offers you nothing,” said the country’s King. “T’Challa, the man who struck you in his pursuit of vengeance, the man who stands before you now, alone, in his own land, offers you his friendship. Do you understand me?”

Tony sighed. “Can I be honest?”

“I would welcome it.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said, prowling around the room once more, his hands flying immediately out of his pockets and out of his control. “I don’t understand why you sent me an official invitation to come to your _mind-bendingly_ rich country and look at all of the things that I _wish_ I had the focus and the time to even begin trying to replicate – love the paint, by the way, very clever, how much data does it take on based on proximity, does it use vibranium in the conduction relays – forget I asked –“

T’Challa folded his arms. “You are looking for an ulterior motive I don’t have.”

“You just _want to be my buddy, pal_?” Tony asked, bitterly. He felt every single sleepless night, pharmaceutically and naturally produced, banked up behind his eyes, and his eyes felt as if they’d been rinsed in chilli sauce. 

“I have robbed you of the chance to avenge your father,” said T’Challa, leaving Tony all but doubled-over in an instant. “It grieves me that you should be kept from the right to make the decision yourself, as I did. It grieves me that you were kept from truth for so long – deceit is ugly, and deceit by friends uglier still. It falls to me to make what amends I can. So I _ask_ , Tony Stark, for your hand in friendship, and your assistance in easing my conscience, and I _ask_ \- when I might demand, or enforce – your friendship to be strong in the next few hours.”

A tapeworm of suspicion squirmed in Tony’s empty insides. “What?”

“There is something I would like you to see,” said T’Challa. He held out his hand once more. “So. Shall we be friends, Mr Stark? Or would you like to go home now?”

* * *

High above the mountain-tops, Tony Stark stood in an empty laboratory. 

“Usually this is a pretext for the showing of etchings,” he said, staring out over the mist-covered jungles, imagining the vast reserves of vibranium that lay beneath them; here and there he saw through the tall canopy the glimpses of a city in which the division between urban and rural, nature and mankind had lost all meaning, where technology, T’Challa had quietly assured him, lived and grew hand-in-hand with the land and society. _Yes_ , he’d confirmed, when Tony asked him, impatient with poetry as ever, if this meant they used photosynthetic cells to power their grid.

The King of Wakanda and protector of its people lifted the corners of his mouth in a very small smile. “Usually, Mr Stark, I get to know people a little better before I ask them to view my euphemistic artwork.”

Tony blinked, and said nothing.

“Adversity is the making of so many great achievements,” T’Challa said, peering back out over the land. “Sometimes I think we have it too easy here.”

“Ask your neighbours about that.”

“We defend our borders zealously,” the king admitted. “But it is no secret that few kings before me will have moved so much in the world beyond them. We will need friends. _I_ will need friends. No one can rely on his strength alone.” He paused, leaving Tony to ruminate on these words without much grace. “But adversity also shapes us into that which is designed to face only one situation,” he said, thoughtfully.

“When all you have is a hammer,” Tony said, automatically.

“Indeed,” T’Challa acknowledged the homily without completing it. “My fear would be that, were I to begin resolving our issues with the wider world with violence, it might be impossible to stop; my father’s failing, perhaps, was the inability to foresee that placing us in the spotlight would have consequences that made it impossible for us to refrain from taking up arms.”

Tony said nothing. The mist rose gently from the vast treetops.

“In America,” T’Challa added, “I see a country built on those who had nothing and strove hard. This is their advantage, now; the value of hard work is acknowledged.”

“Paid lip service to,” said Tony.

“But to their detriment; there is the belief that hard work can solve any famine, any drought, any loss.” 

“Your point being?” Tony asked, leaning on the glass. He saw his reflection in it, and nearly shuddered: his skin had taken the drought of sleep badly and his eyes were almost bloodshot. He looked how he felt, and he felt as though there wasn’t a shower long enough and hot enough to get the grime and grease of the world out of the inside of his self.

“America’s champions, also, are shaped by their adversities,” said the King, standing beside him. “A man who believes he must hit as hard as he can to leave the tiniest mark does not learn to pull his punches; the man who believes he will never be enough for anyone cannot trust a hand of friendship when it is placed before him. Or forgive a mistake.”

“So,” Tony said, “you did in fact bring me here to scold me.”

“I brought you here to absolve myself,” said T’Challa, pointing behind Tony.

Tony had been ignoring the large wall of glass on the far side of the room because he respected the right of every powerful man to indulge in disproportionate theatrics. They were, after all, his bread and butter. He had also been ignoring it because the sight of it made his breathing turn into something like a poltergeist in his abdomen, and he didn’t think he’d make the best impression by collapsing on his first state visit to Wakanda.

The wall slowly lit up.

Behind a deep sheet of glass, as peaceful as a Disney World Sleeping Beauty, upright in a soft white cradle, lay the one-armed body of Steve’s Bucky, the murdering asshole who was apparently more important than Truth, Justice, The American Way, accountability, the law, any future, and Tony Stark’s friendship, the latter of which Tony thought, without much enthusiasm, he should have come to expect. The only damn reason Rhodey hadn’t left him as well was because he couldn’t exactly _walk out_ on him.

Tony pictured the frozen face before him, its expressionless intensity captured on film, destroying Tony’s life for a few bags full of serum. The serum they’d used on Steve. Steve, who Howard Stark had always cared more about than something he merely made with his _wife_. Tony wondered for one hopeless moment what kind of father he might have made himself. Worse? Better? The same?

He railroaded his thoughts and dragged them back to Bucky Barnes.

He thought he could feel his muscles tensing up but it was only T’Challa’s hand, light but strong, on his bicep, holding him back without force or fear.

“Do you still want to kill him?” he asked, when a pause the length of all human history had passed.

Tony looked at the sleeping face. He wanted to throw up, and he wanted to sleep, and he wanted to throw a goddamn shoe at Steve Rogers and repeatedly ask him _why he had done this_ , but the murderous, wounded-animal rage that had moved him before simply wouldn’t arise. He suspected, somewhere in his hindbrain, that what he really wanted to do was cry.

He shook his head.

“It passes,” T’Challa said. “It had passed for me, also, by the time we reached Zemo.”

Tony said nothing. 

“In Wakanda,” T’Challa said, “it is law that for three days after a great shock, a terrible loss, a man or woman’s actions are not their own. They belong to the emotion. We do not punish them; we do not judge them. The friends and family of the man or woman keep them safe, if they are able to. After this time, filial responsibility for vengeance in the case of murder returns.”

Tony said, “Under American law you can pretty much pick and choose on what counts depending on the state and the judge.” He blinked at his own face, reflected on Bucky’s thorax. “Or the colour of your skin, a lot of the time.”

“So I’ve heard,” said T’Challa. “It sounds barbaric. It is not a culture accustomed to treating dangerous things with due respect.”

Tony let the moment pass. There were too many things he could have said that would have been funny, or smart, or sarcastic: he looked at the frost on the window and tried to imagine what it felt like to be brainwashed.

“You have the opportunity to avenge your father,” said T’Challa.

“I’m betting you also told Steve you’d keep him safe,” Tony said. It wasn’t a question. Bucky wouldn’t be here at all if the promise hadn’t been made.

“I said you had the opportunity,” the king said.

“I don’t give a shit about my dad,” said Tony, staring through the glass again. “But he killed my _mom_. You saw.”

“He saw, too,” T’Challa said. “Whenever he wakes, he will live with the knowledge that he was used, as a tool is used, as a weapon is used, to hurt and to humiliate hundreds of blameless people, and that he has been denied even the chance to draw upon his own memories to make amends. It is a lot for a man to bear.”

Tony found his hand had made a fist against the glass. He tried to coax it into uncurling, but it wouldn’t. “I suppose you’re big enough that you feel sorry for Zemo too?”

T’Challa said, “In time.”

“Where I come from,” Tony said, leaning on the glass. “We have this saying. _Cool motive, still murder._ ”

“In Wakanda we don’t make a habit of taking moral instruction from sitcoms,” said T’Challa, “but I take your point. However, I am not merely one man. I am also a nation. And as a nation, it is required of me to understand Zemo; to know what creates a man like Zemo, what nurtures such murderous hatred in his heart, that it might be avoided among the hearts of those I rule. And it is simple in his case: he lost that he valued most dearly, and was denied the right to respond. In his own actions I see my reflection, and I am saved from repeating them.”

Tony looked at his reflection. “I’m not brainwashed.”

“That is your advantage.”

Tony turned his back on Bucky Barnes. “And Steve?”

“I cannot speak for anyone but myself and for my nation, with their assent,” said T’Challa. “But for myself,” he gave Tony a rather cautious pat on the shoulder, as if he were a landmine that might go off, “I am glad to have met you.”

“Yeah,” Tony muttered, looking at the floor. “I can take a hint.”

“Perhaps under better circumstances, next time.”

“Like when I’ve _slept_?”

“Modesty prevents me from comment,” said T’Challa, raising his eyebrows, “But perhaps you might benefit from acknowledging that you are flesh and blood. And next time—“

“What, you’ll show me your etchings?” Tony leaned on the darkened glass, and, true swimmer that he was, struck out for innuendo to keep from falling into the abyss that beckoned.

T’Challa gave him a long, appraising look which travelled from the soles of his shoes to the top of his unstyled hair, and returned to hold his gaze for a time which was, Tony was sure, a breach of royal etiquette as laid out by the scary security lady. He raised both his eyebrows again, and said, “Never say never, Mr Stark. I had rather thought you would prefer to be introduced to my engineering laboratories.”

* * *

“Did you see what Vision gave me?” Rhodey greeted Tony on his return to the hospital room. 

Tony glanced at the nightstand, and the whole room shifted wearily before him. He put out a hand to steady himself, and hoped Rhodey still couldn’t move his head enough to see it. 

“What?”

“The card,” said Rhodey, with a snort.

Tony picked up the Quote A Day Calendar card. It said, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”

“That’s gnomic,” Tony muttered, “Even for him. And terrible, terrible taste in music.”

“You’ll hurt his feelings,” Rhodey warned.

“It’s not his turn,” Tony said, sinking onto his heels with his back against the wall. “I’ll get around to him again tomorrow.”

“Oh, so it’s my turn now?” Rhodey wriggled his fingers experimentally. “How was Wakanda?”

“Impressive.”

“You don’t sound impressed. Did you bring me a postcard?”

“Shit,” said Tony, slapping the wall behind him. “Totally slipped my mind in between being invited to come back and look at the _actual coolest toys I have ever seen_ and being shown a popsicle murderer as part of some kind of regal therapy trip. Did Pepper call?”

“You had your phone,” said Rhodey, “How would I know?”

Tony pinched his own face between his hands. “I got the most polite strong-arming about sympathy and empathy I’ve ever experienced in my life,” he said, banging the back of his head against the wall. “He just stopped short of telling me to forget and _thank god_.”

“What about forgiving?” Rhodey asked, following Tony’s typically non-linear conversation with an ease born of long experience.

“I _guess_ he forgave me?” Tony frowned. “I don’t remember that part too well.”

“No, did he tell you to _forgive_ and forget –“

“ _I_ don’t get to forgive people,” Tony said, slipping down onto his ass with his feet in front of him. “You only do that if you’ve _been_ wronged, not if you’re the asshole who keeps doing things wrong. That’s why Steve keeps sending me those nice little Hallmark Fuck Yous; grinding his forgiveness into my face. _You did something wrong but don’t worry, son, pal, buddy, pal, son, I **forgive** you._ ”

It sounded so bitter to him that he could taste the ashes of it in his teeth.

“Does he?” Rhodey asked, surprised. “That sounded more like… well, like Obie.”

“Okay, so I may have exaggerated a little.”

“Tony Stark, if I wasn’t so comfortable here on this bed I would come over there and slap you.”

“Okay,” Tony stopped in mid head-beat and scratched the healing burn on the back of his hand instead. “So I may have conflated a couple of people. What’s one massive treachery between friends anyhow?”

“I mean,” Rhodey said, while Tony scratched harder, “You at least admit you’re mad at him because he did something wrong.”

“And yet I’m the asshole,” Tony said. “No, it was me. You can’t just act on rage. What happens? Just an endless cycle of … poof, one more dead person, gotta avenge them, then they’re dead, on and on, until there’s no one left. Though I guess if I killed Bucky and then Steve killed me to avenge him at least that wouldn’t go any further, I don’t really picture anyone coming to avenge _me_ after old Red White and Blue laid me out…”

“You’re rambling.”

“Hey yeah? Come over here and say that,” Tony said, weakly.

“I will kick your _ass_ ,” Rhodey promised.

“I’m right here, do it.”

“You’re gonna be so sore.”

“I will literally bend right over so you can take the first shot without hindrance,” Tony said, slumping over his own legs. “Where did I put the pills?”

“If it’s not on the ceiling I haven’t seen it,” Rhodey said. “But hey, I can wiggle my fingers enough to turn this goddamn screen onto something that isn’t _Friendship Is Magic_ now, you sadist.”

“Friendship _is_ magic,” Tony said archly, patting his pockets. “Don’t you forget that.”

“You’re a terrible friend,” Rhodey said, with a kind of fondness that made Tony want to cry for the second time in forty-eight hours. He reached under the cabinet and pulled out a pill bottle, instead. The anti-narcs were getting low. 

“I know, I know,” Tony said, shaking the bottle. “Too bad you don’t deserve any better.”

“Oh my God,” Rhodey said, without rancour, “I will kick your ass, I will kick what’s left of your liver… don’t take any more of those.”

“No time for sleep,” Tony said, heaving himself off the floor with the kind of noise he’d heard his father make getting out of a chair one time. The comparison only elicited a small twitch. “Busy, busy, busy. Work, work, work. We can’t all laze around in bed—“

“Maybe he’s waiting for you to forgive him,” Rhodey called, after him.

* * *

The official seal of Wakanda headed a short note:

> Any assistance I can offer in Colonel Rhodes’ recovery is yours.

Tony stopped short of writing _I broke him, I’ll fix him_ on the back of the card and sending it right back. He wracked his brain for a more diplomatic version. He wondered what Pepper would say.

He put the card under her letter.

* * *

Pepper didn’t call.

Tony didn’t sleep.

Another letter came.

* * *

Tony threw the envelope: Tony Stark, fountain pen, tidy handwriting, postmark from Athens – with its contents, into the waste paper basket, unopened.

As an afterthought, he threw all of Pepper’s invitations, the other letters, and T’Challa’s invitation in the bin as well.

The desk sat dusty, naked except for two extremely valuable pens and the world’s most expensive engagement ring, in a small velvet case.

Tony caught his reflection in the darkened TV screen.

“You,” he told it, “are an asshole, and no one likes you.”

* * *

“Did you know,” Vision said, haunting the kitchen like the spectre of red death, “how many years sleep deprivation takes off your life?”

“Not _enough_ ,” Tony said.

* * *

“Nature, nurture, nurture, nature,” Tony muttered, spray-cleaning his own feet with a pressure hose very much not intended for the purpose. “You get a heroic asshole for a gene donor and a villain asshole for your raise-you pater, and you don’t have the good sense to turn out like your Mom?”

He switched the TV on. The channel remained on a loop of MTV Greatest Hits of the 1980s for the remainder of the night.

* * *

Tony emptied the waste paper bin over the floor.

He took the unopened letter from the mess and laid it under the pens.

“Maybe later,” he said.

* * *

“Somnophobia,” Vision said reading aloud while Tony tried to paint a diamond-carved vibranium chip with rubber paint and a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking. 

“Didn’t she win Miss Universe last year?” Tony asked.

“Can be caused by trauma,” Vision said, still reading.

“If I ever meet anyone who has experienced any,” Tony said, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, “I will be sure to let them know. Perhaps you could call up all of my exes and ask them if they have trouble sleeping.”

“How long since you last slept?” Vision asked, closing the book.

“I had a power nap this afternoon,” Tony lied, laying the brush aside and flexing his hand.

“My understanding of a power nap is that the term does not cover losing consciousness abruptly for thirty seconds while trying to manually change a lightbulb,” said Vision, tersely. “I had offered to do it.”

“I like to,” Tony began, and couldn’t remember how he’d planned on finishing the sentence. “You’re fussing. Don’t you have the cat to bully?”

“The cat,” said Vision, with a little more warmth, “eats and sleeps when it is natural for her to do so.”

“So do I,” said Tony, unable to find the brush. “Which, apparently, covers when I’m trying to change a light bulb. Where’s the brush?”

Vision faded through the table and into the room below without another word.

* * *

Pepper didn’t call.

Tony considered burning the letter.

Instead, he opened it at arms’ length, unfolded the paper, and said, in a mocking voice, “You should know that I’m very disappointed in you.”

When he’d composed himself enough to read, and squinted enough times to keep the words on the page, what was actually written was:

>   
>  _I’m in Athens. Parts of the city are on fire. There’s a little dog that runs in and out of the tear gas wearing a gas mask. It would break your heart. Whose fault all of this is changes each week. The country ran out of money again, and it will run out of money again, and again. I don’t know as much first aid as I thought I did. People are trying to teach me. I know exactly as much Greek as I thought I did: none. I’m trying to make smaller movements now; get people out of buildings without tearing them down. It’s hard to resist the temptation to make like Atlas and lift everything up at once, figuratively and literally, but you don’t fix anything with grand gestures. Just one small, faltering step at a time._
> 
> _Natasha sends her regards; she left two days ago. Business elsewhere. So it’s just me right now._
> 
> _I hope you’re okay._

There was a drawing of the Parthenon, viewed from the very base. The angle was extreme; the columns disappeared to tiny pinpricks. Underneath, Steve had written, _looking back over millennia at all the mistakes it’s possible to make makes you feel very small_.

“First time for everything,” Tony said, but he remembered what T’Challa had said, too.

* * *

Venice smelled like a goddamn open sewer. Tony wished, hand to God, that he could still face taking cocaine. Anything – the delusions, the next-day jitters, the horrendous tachycardia – was a step up from feeling like a Renaissance noble every time he jammed a handkerchief full of cologne under his nose, or didn’t, and nearly choked instead.

His hotel had checked his passport three times to make sure he was really _the_ Tony Stark. 

“You don’t look like him,” said the reception desk.

 _I don’t feel like him_ , Tony thought, taking his key card with a smile that would have frightened gargoyles. He felt like the rinsed corpse of himself. There was a card in his luggage.

“BRING ME BACK A POSTCARD OF A GONDALA OR I WILL PUNCH YOU”, said the note. The capital letters were uneven and huge, but as the first thing Rhodey had been able to write after significant surgery and nerve regeneration issues, Tony wouldn’t have swapped it for the Mona Lisa. It was a work of art. Under the note was a pair of the thickest, most florid, disgusting, ugly, lumpy socks Tony had ever laid eyes on.

“These are actually just going to fall straight off my feet,” Tony said, impressed. 

Apparently pre-empting this complaint, they had been labelled, “Bedsocks” with the mathematically perfect letters he was only just beginning to recognise were not the work of a computer at all. “For sleeping in”, the note explained, further, in case Tony had lost his one remaining brain cell.

“Maybe after lunch,” Tony told the socks.

He walked down to a café which had been open for two hundred years; continuously, by the look of the waiter, who seemed to have had even less sleep than Tony.

Sitting at one of the tables closest to the canal, apparently impervious to the stench, was a man with dyed-dark hair and a very low level of stubble, drawing the gulls as they bobbed in the canal water, trying to stab each other with their mad, hateful yellow beaks. The brown leather biker jacket had been sewn up using a surgical stitch somewhere at the left shoulder. He was wearing blue deck shoes. 

_As soon as Nat’s not around to dress you,_ Tony thought, irrationally. He tried to remember the name of the blonde intelligence agent but could only recall her hairstyle.

“I thought you’d be here,” said Steve, looking up from his drawing.

“You mean a little bird, or rather a large, red, wall-challenged idiot who keeps knitting socks, told you,” said Tony.

“A little premonition, a little exposition,” Steve agreed, pulling back a chair. “You look like hell.”

“You’re not looking wonderful yourself,” said Tony, surprised.

“It’s been a difficult month,” Steve let the rest of the small talk flow to the floor like sand from a broken hourglass. “Sharon gave me some of Peggy’s old notebooks.”

Tony said nothing. The light dancing on the canal water disoriented him.

“Yes?” said the waiter, arriving beside them.

“Espresso,” Tony said, unthinking. 

“Are you _sure_?” the waiter asked, and Tony was so tired that he couldn’t tell whether he was speaking English or Italian. He couldn’t figure out which to answer in, and only pulled down his sunglasses to glare at the man until he went away.

Steve removed an elderly jotter from under his sketchbook.

“The gut feeling is the impetus. The mind has to steer. Believe in what is right; act on what is kind.” Tony read more slowly than seemed normal, and sat up. “Regular Marcus Aurelius, wasn’t she?”

“When I was a kid,” Steve said, and stopped. “You know the story.”

“Heard it every goddamn day of my life,” Tony said, from between his teeth.

“When all you got is one friend and a lot of jerks beating on you it’s really easy to know who the good guys and the bad guys are,” Steve said, putting the jotter back into his bag. “The good guys are him, and the bad guys are the ones punching you till you can’t get up.”

“Ever wonder if they thought they were the good guys too?” Tony asked. “I mean, I spent most of sixth grade upside down in a toilet, and not just because technically I was a first-grader at that point. All money buys you when you’re that age is more animosity. And a good sandwich, I guess.”

Steve glanced at his own crumb-strewn plate. “I do _now_.”

Tony said, “The guys firing rockets at you in mountain passes think they’re the good guys. Heck, Hydra thought what they were doing was for some bullshit ultimate good. We think we’re the good guys. What if we all have the gut feeling?”

“You sure as fuck don’t,” Steve said.

“Steve Rogers, that was a bad word.”

“Army,” Steve said, and, “Sorry.”

“My virginal ears nearly flew off my fucking head,” Tony said, mildly, as the waiter returned with an espresso and a censorious look. “You were saying something. You’ll forgive me if I can’t remember what the hell it was but my short-term memory doesn’t. At the moment.”

Steve picked at the crumbs on his plate for a little while. Tony watched patterns forming in the motions of his coffee, dark and thick as the canal water but infinitely less disgusting. 

“This is going to sound like some hokey BS,” Steve said at last.

“Good thing my quality control died a death about a week ago,” Tony said. “I mean, have you seen these shoes? Do I look like a man who cares about the hokiness of bullshit? This coffee tastes sublime. I might propose to that waiter.”

“You feel like you have to prove yourself all the time,” Steve began.

“Me?”

“I meant me,” said Steve. “You know the story. Small. Asthma. Punching bullies in the face, punching Hitler in the face, never quite learning—“

“How to pull your punches,” Tony finished, throwing the remaining espresso back purely for the look of contempt on the waiter’s face. “Oh, now he hates me. He’ll come around.”

“I hit too hard,” Steve agreed, “And you’re mean.”

“Hey, I was expected to walk and talk like an adult with the adults, to the adults, as soon as I’d said my first word. First ten words, apparently. Who else gets to read about their first sentence in TIME magazine?” Tony laid the cup back down. Even in the howl and bustle of the Venetian street, with the slop of water against walls and shouts echoing down brick alleys, distorted by the acoustics of waves, the clink of porcelain on porcelain made him jump as if some had burst a paper bag.

“Exactly,” Steve said, as if Tony had managed to make sense. “We’re over-reaching ourselves. And I got big, and you got … kind of adult…”

“Kind of,” Tony agreed.

“And I don’t like looking at what I’ve done,” Steve said, under his breath, “and knowing I’m that guy. The one the little guys feel they can’t fight back against, but they have to keep trying. That’s not _me_. That’s not … that’s not what my Mom raised.”

“We’re bigger than we realise,” said Tony, refraining from mentioning that he’d realised exactly how fucking big he was round about the time someone had fired his own rockets at him, and now every time he heard his own name on TV it was fifty-fifty whether he’d accidentally funded terrorism or saved a species, but he couldn’t _stop_ , because if he didn’t hear his name at all, how would he know what it was? “You breathe out, someone else chokes.”

Steve toyed with his pen.

“Did you go to Wakanda?”

“I left it like I found it,” Tony said.

Steve nodded at his drawing. “He was all I had for a really long time.”

“It feels like that,” Tony said, thinking of Pepper. 

“I forgot,” Steve said. “I stopped thinking, I just looked at him and there we were, back in Brooklyn, everyone else trying to beat the snot out of us, no reason, no mercy, no stopping. And I forgot.”

“A lie isn’t a punch in the face,” Tony said, sitting back.

Steve hunched up over his drawing until he seemed half the size. “Yeah. It’s a lot worse. I didn’t think. That’s the whole,” he gestured to the jotter, tucked safe under his arms. “I knew Bucky hadn’t, didn’t set off that bomb. I knew the accords weren’t going to provide me with the freedom I needed to do what has to be done. And then I just stopped there.” He made a gesture with his hand, a blank wall. “I still don’t know if I thought I was protecting you or protecting him. I hoped both. I got neither.”

“T’Challa feels sorry for him,” said Tony, sitting back, slumping back over his chair.

“Bucky?” Steve gave a small start.

“Zemo.”

Steve nodded, slowly, and turned his empty plate around a few times. “He’s a bigger man than I am. I don’t think I could find it in me to – I guess you –“

“He’s never been a small man,” Tony said, tipping his espresso cup back and forth. “T’Challa. He’s. Just look at him. He knows everything he says or does has an impact.”

Steve gave a small smile. “You trust him?”

“I _like_ him.”

“Mm. Me too.”

Tony put the cup down. “You trust _me_?”

Steve said, “This should be the other way around, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but,” Tony pulled his sunglasses down until Steve could see his eyes, and gave him a warning look. “I am much, much better at being The Asshole than you are. _An_ Asshole, we’re about even. _The_ Asshole? I’m sorry, I have that sewn up. Oh god. Don’t think about sewing up assholes because I just did and now I am regretting… well, pretty much everything.”

“Are you—“ 

“If you ask if I’m okay I’m going to get my fiancé, the judgemental waiter, to throw you right in that canal,” Tony said, pushing his sunglasses back up his nose. “I’m great. I’m magnificent.”

“You look sick.”

“We can’t all be beauty queens,” said Tony. “Next time you want to try your hand at lying to me,” he added, trying to keep the edge out of his voice, “maybe stick to ‘you look great, Tony’ kinds of lies.”

* * *

Pepper still hadn’t called.

Tony turned off his phone and stretched out on the couch. _Casablanca_ on TV. Empty mugs in a line along the bottom of the couch, so if his arm drooped he’d smack one of them over. Tony had never much enjoyed fiction that lasted longer than half an hour – he claimed not to have the attention span but in truth loathed the demand of emotional investment in something he had no control over – but he lay watching the black and white figures on the screen like a light show for the terminally stoned.

He pointedly ignored the card on which he had written Dr Running Bear’s number.

“Do you think she’s going to call?” he asked, after a while.

“I can’t know, said Vision, passing through the ceiling. “Perhaps you ought to go to bed.”

Tony shook his head. The movement made the room spin; the spinning made his heart race; the pounding in his chest up and clenched his jaw locked shut; the locked jaws held his breath prisoner—

“I will wake you,” Vision said, sitting carefully on the arm of the couch, as if remembering where it was in order to sit on it, instead of in it. “If you like.”

Tony tried to eyeball him aggressively but couldn’t focus. He appeared to be wearing some kind of knitwear but the most Tony could register was that it was dark grey. “What?”

“It occurred that you might be avoiding sleep through fear of bad dreams,” Vision said, having apparently calculated the most humiliating possible phrasing for his concern.

Tony’s ego, the sole remaining rat on the rapidly sinking ship of consciousness, made a feeble protest. “Hey.”

“It is a common symptom in cases of –“

“Nope,” Tony said, rolling onto his face.

“Would you _like_ me to wake you,” Vision said, not to be deterred from his calm, slow interrogation, “if you appear to be in difficulty?”

“I’m going to invent an implant,” Tony informed the couch cushions at close quarters, “which prevents dream memories from forming.”

“Not everything can be resolved through the application of sophisticated enough technology, Mr Stark.”

“I’m gonna prove you wrong, pal,” Tony said, his mouth half-stuffed with cushion and his brain lurching as violently as a mountain train. “Wake me.”

“Of course,” Vision said. Tony felt a light pressure on the part of his forehead that wasn’t buried in unwashed upholstery. It was cool, and felt like television static looked. 

He frowned. “Did you just move my hair?”

It was a credit to Vision’s powers of perception that he could decipher the question at all. “Apologies. Do you mind?”

Tony, drifting into the murky water of sleep with more speed than he liked and an inevitability which still alarmed him, wasn’t sure if his reply made it past his lips, but he _meant_ to mumble, “I’ll decide when I wake up.”


End file.
